Descent Into Madness Quotes

They had stripped us of everything we were taught made us women, and then told us we were mad.

Hell is a different place for each man, or each man has his own particular hell. My descent into the inferno is a descent into the irrational level of existence, where the instincts and blind emotions are loose, where one lives by pure impulse, pure fantasy, and therefore pure madness. No, that is not the inferno.

The classic business story is much like the classic human story. There is rise and fall; the overcoming of great odds, the upholding of principles despite the cost, questions of rivalry and succession, and even the possibility of descent into madness.

Because if feels so much like falling Into love Into you and me Being in love is scary So much like falling A frightening descent into Beautiful madness Yes, you and we We're Falling into Us And I don't dare stop the fall Because I need it far too much

What was a surprise was when the dog answered his question. 'Want to play ball now,' Gabriel [the dog] declared in a very clear and precise voice. Aaron opened his eyes and gazed up into the grinning face of the animal. There was no doubt now. The day's descent into madness was complete. He was, in fact, losing his mind.

Madness is a wholly human malady borne in a brain too evolved—or not quite evolved enough—to bear the awful burden of its own existence.

How easily such a thing can become a mania, how the most normal and sensible of women once this passion to be thin is upon them, can lose completely their sense of balance and proportion and spend years dealing with this madness.

all sensations appeared swallowed up in a mad rushing descent as of the soul into Hades. Then silence, and stillness, and night were the universe.

(“I promise myself to be so strong that nothing can disturb my peace of mind … to look at the sunny side of everything and make my optimism come true … to be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.”)

Part of love is preparing for death... Afterwards comes the madness. And then the loneliness... [People say] you'll come out of it... And you do come out of it, that's true. But you don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil slick; you are tarred and feathered for life.

To put this another way, my words here recede from lived experience. But in the end there’s too much reproach and ignorance—depression as a cause for disgrace and contempt—for me not to write them anyway. Words, after all, remain, in this world, an aperture through which might appear some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears.

me Being in love is scary So much like falling A frightening descent into Beautiful madness Yes, you and we We're Falling into Us And I don't dare stop the fall Because I need it far too much

If I could mimic the dynamic of any Shakespearean marriage, I’d choose to mimic the Macbeths—before the murder, ruthless ambition, and torturous descents into madness and death, that is.

Like the house committee investigation— like the preceding 45-led years since the escalator descent into the madness of the infant king, like the faulty re-emergence in fits and starts from the miasma of disease and its wake, the level of stress the prevalence of anxiety moment to moment, day to day was immense and incessant— seemingly unbearable—so great I thought so many times I could not continue to withstand it sustain it and yet and yet it had to be done. One insane venture accomplished. Lessons learned, both exquisitely beautiful and exquisitely painful.

If you define madness as the opposite of sane, you are forced into providing a definition of sanity. Can you define it? Can you tell me what it is to be sane? Is it to hold no beliefs that are contrary to reality? That our thoughts and actions contain no absurd contradictions?...If that is your criterion, then we are all mad—except those of us who make no claim to understand the difference. Perhaps there is no difference, except in our own heads. In other words...madness is a wholly human malady borne in a brain too evolved—or not quite evolved enough—to bear the awful burden of its own existence.

Fuck it,” said Private First Class Chris Barnes, raising his hand. “Let’s do it. This sounds like a great fucking idea. Who wants to get blown up?” They started laughing. Watt, Barker, Cortez, and Private First Class Shane Hoeck all raised their hands. They did not give a damn anymore. It was all so absurd to them, that they were going to drive up and down a road for the next eight hours as bomb magnets. The only thing that they could do was laugh. “Hooray! We’re going out to get blown up!” they sang. “Who’s on board? Hey, who wants to come get blown up? Woohoo! Yeah, dude, I am ready to go fucking die! We are all going to fucking die!

He was embarrassed by his feelings. He had grown up in a home without love, filled with petty cruelties and alcoholism and despair, a place where dreams of a better life were absurd and worthy of venomous critique from his own father.

Each day was the same, an infinite parade of degradations and torture accomplished by unyielding women overseen by the condescension of uncaring men. If not mad already upon internment, surely no mind could withstand the torment of this hell.

I want to live simple. I want orange and red leaves and high school football and small town life. I want to erase the days lived in the hollow and free my mind and body from the trickery of a fast life. I am throwing out the Gucci shoes and Prada bags and the heavy burden and the in crowd.

A woman once told me that, for a time after her husband died, her grief was as constant as breathing. Then one day, while pushing a shopping cart, she realized she was thinking about yogurt. With time, thoughts in this vein became contiguous. With more time thoughts in this vein became sustained. Eventually they won a kind of majority. Her grieving had ended while she wasn’t watching (although, she added, grief never ends). And so it was with my depression. One day in December I changed a furnace filter with modest interest in the process. The day after that I drove to Gorst for the repair of a faulty seat belt. On the thirty-first I went walking with a friend—grasslands, cattails, asparagus fields, ice-bound sloughs, frost-rimed fencerows—with a familiar engrossment in the changing of winter light. I was home, that night, in time to bang pots and pans at the year’s turn: “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.” It wasn’t at all like that—this eve was cloudy, the stars hidden by high racing clouds—but I found myself looking skyward anyway, into the night’s maw, and I noticed I was thinking of January’s appointments without a shudder, even with anticipation. Who knows why, but the edge had come off, and being me felt endurable again. My crucible had crested, not suddenly but less gradually than how it had come, and I felt the way a newborn fawn looks in an elementary school documentary. Born, but on shaky, insecure legs. Vulnerable, but in this world for now, with its leaf buds and packs of wolves. Was it pharmacology, and if so, is that a bad thing? Or do I credit time for my healing? Or my Jungian? My reading? My seclusion? My wife’s love? Maybe I finally exhausted my tears, or my dreams at last found sufficient purchase, or maybe the news just began to sound better, the world less precarious, not headed for disaster. Or was it talk in the end, the acknowledgments I made? The surfacing of so many festering pains? My children’s voices down the hall,

When she dies, you are not at first surprised. Part of love is preparing for death. You feel confirmed in your love when she dies. You got it right. This is part of it all. Afterward comes the madness. And then the loneliness: not the spectacular solitude you had anticipated, not the interesting martyrdom of widowhood, but just loneliness. You expect something almost geological-- vertigo in a shelving canyon -- but it's not like that; it's just misery as regular as a job. What do we doctors say? I'm deeply sorry, Mrs Blank; there will of course be a period of mourning but rest assured you will come out of it; two of these each evening, I would suggest; perhaps a new interst, Mrs Blank; can maintenance, formation dancing?; don't worry, six months will see you back on the roundabout; come and see me again any time; oh nurse, when she calls, just give her this repeat will you, no I don't need to see her, well it's not her that's dead is it, look on the bright side. What did she say her name was? And then it happens to you. There's no glory in it. Mourning is full of time; nothing but time.... you should eat stuffed sow's heart. I might yet have to fall back on this remedy. I've tried drink, but what does that do? Drink makes you drunk, that's all it's ever been able to do. Work, they say, cures everything. It doesn't; often, it doesn't even induce tiredness: the nearest you get to it is a neurotic lethargy. And there is always time. Have some more time. Take your time. Extra time. Time on your hands. Other people think you want to talk. 'Do you want to talk about Ellen?' they ask, hinting that they won't be embarrassed if you break down. Sometimes you talk, sometimes you don't; it makes little difference. The word aren't the right ones; or rather, the right words don't exist. 'Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.' You talk, and you find the language of bereavement foolishly inadequate. You seem to be talking about other people's griefs. I loved her; we were happy; I miss her. She didn't love me; we were unhappy; I miss her. There is a limited choice of prayers on offer: gabble the syllables. And you do come out of it, that's true. After a year, after five. But your don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.

Like many fellow travelers who’ve crossed the Styx and returned, I view the itinerary as transformational. On the one hand, I won’t join that cohort claiming gratitude for their time in hell; on the other, I can say that in the wake of my depression, I’m pierced by other people as I wasn’t before, that I waste less time entertaining myself, and that I hear my thoughts with a useful attention to their tenor, fairness, and sanity. I feel equanimous most of the time, and have a strong impulse to give. My life has become, if you will, intentional, in a way it might not be if I hadn’t made my plummet. William Styron died in 2006. During the last third of his life, after the publication of Darkness Visible, he became a mental health advocate. I’m among those aided by his account, who found in it succor, but I’m also mindful of complaints such as those in Joel P. Smith’s essay “Depression: Darker Than Darkness”—that Styron was depressed for months, not years; that he was never alone; that he had the best of treatment; that he stayed in a hospital “as comfortable as they come”; and that he didn’t have to rely on radical remedies like electroshock therapy: all of this to say that Styron didn’t plumb the depths and can’t represent the depressed, and neither can I. Others have and have had it worse. For them, depression never yields or lessens. For them there’s no rising into the light of day, no edifications, and no gains, nothing but the wish to be dead, which is, after a marathon of untenable suffering, granted. “E

A universe away from the idea that if you’re a teenager cursed with a schizophrenogenic mother, a descent into schizophrenic madness is your escape. In other words, this is another domain where we have managed to subtract out the notion of blame from the disease (and, in the process, become vastly more effective at treating the disease than when mothers were being given scarlet letters).

For this scribe has read a great many of these accounts and taken away another lesson: that to be a woman is to have your story misremembered. Discarded. Twisted. In courtyard tales, women are the adulterous wives whose treachery begins a husband’s descent into murderous madness or the long-suffering mothers who give birth to proper heroes. Biographers polish away the jagged edges of capable, ruthless queens so they may be remembered as saints, and geographers warn believing men away from such and such a place with scandalous tales of lewd local females who cavort in the sea and ravish foreign interlopers. Women are the forgotten spouses and unnamed daughters. Wet nurses and handmaidens; thieves and harlots. Witches. A titillating anecdote to tell your friends back home or a warning.

I look out at the sad, pre-conditioned faces and am returned to the lost feelings. I taste the screams building up in my throat, the hurling accusations. I immediately remove myself from the physical tantrums and refuse the same old, same old destructive patterns. I will not curl up in fetal position on the bathroom floor, my sobs drenching the carpet. I practice deep breathing and kind thinking.

Themes of descent often turn on the struggle between the titanic and the demonic within the same person or group. In Moby Dick, Ahab’s quest for the whale may be mad and “monomaniacal,” as it is frequently called, or even evil so far as he sacrifices his crew and ship to it, but evil or revenge are not the point of the quest. The whale itself may be only a “dumb brute,” as the mate says, and even if it were malignantly determined to kill Ahab, such an attitude, in a whale hunted to the death, would certainly be understandable if it were there. What obsesses Ahab is in a dimension of reality much further down than any whale, in an amoral and alienating world that nothing normal in the human psyche can directly confront. The professed quest is to kill Moby Dick, but as the portents of disaster pile up it becomes clear that a will to identify with (not adjust to) what Conrad calls the destructive element is what is really driving Ahab. Ahab has, Melville says, become a “Prometheus” with a vulture feeding on him. The axis image appears in the maelstrom or descending spiral (“vortex”) of the last few pages, and perhaps in a remark by one of Ahab’s crew: “The skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world.” But the descent is not purely demonic, or simply destructive: like other creative descents, it is partly a quest for wisdom, however fatal the attaining of such wisdom may be. A relation reminiscent of Lear and the fool develops at the end between Ahab and the little black cabin boy Pip, who has been left so long to swim in the sea that he has gone insane. Of him it is said that he has been “carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro . . . and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps.” Moby Dick is as profound a treatment as modern literature affords of the leviathan symbolism of the Bible, the titanic-demonic force that raises Egypt and Babylon to greatness and then hurls them into nothingness; that is both an enemy of God outside the creation, and, as notably in Job, a creature within it of whom God is rather proud. The leviathan is revealed to Job as the ultimate mystery of God’s ways, the “king over all the children of pride” (41:34), of whom Satan himself is merely an instrument. What this power looks like depends on how it is approached. Approached by Conrad’s Kurtz through his Antichrist psychosis, it is an unimaginable horror: but it may also be a source of energy that man can put to his own use. There are naturally considerable risks in trying to do so: risks that Rimbaud spoke of in his celebrated lettre du voyant as a “dérèglement de tous les sens.” The phrase indicates the close connection between the titanic and the demonic that Verlaine expressed in his phrase poète maudit, the attitude of poets who feel, like Ahab, that the right worship of the powers they invoke is defiance.

their footfalls? Finally some combination thereof, or these many things as permutations of each other—as alternative vocabularies? However it was, by January I was winnowed, and soon dispensed with pills and analysis (the pills I was weaned from gradually), and took up my unfinished novel again, Our Lady of the Forest, about a girl who sees the Virgin Mary, a man who wants a miracle, a priest who suffers spiritual anxiety, and a woman in thrall to cynicism. It seems to me now that the sum of those figures mirrors the shape of my psyche before depression, and that the territory of the novel forms a map of my psyche in the throes of gathering disarray. The work as code for the inner life, and as fodder for my own biographical speculations. Depression, in this conceit, might be grand mal writer’s block. Rather than permitting its disintegration at the hands of assorted unburied truths risen into light as narrative, the ego incites a tempest in the brain, leaving the novelist to wander in a whiteout with his half-finished manuscript awry in his arms, where the wind might blow it away. I don’t find this facile. It seems true—or true for me—that writing fiction is partly psychoanalysis, a self-induced and largely unconscious version. This may be why stories threaten readers with the prospect of everything from the merest dart wound to a serious breach in the superstructure. To put it another way, a good story addresses the psyche directly, while the gatekeeper ego, aware of this trespass—of a message sent so daringly past its gate, a compelling dream insinuating inward—can only quaver through a story’s reading and hope its ploys remains unilluminated. Against a story of penetrating virtuosity—The Metamorphosis, or Lear on the heath—this gatekeeper can only futilely despair, and comes away both revealed and provoked, and even, at times, shattered. In lesser fiction—fiction as entertainment, narcissism, product, moral tract, or fad—there is also some element of the unconscious finding utterance, chiefly because it has the opportunity, but in these cases its clarity and force are diluted by an ill-conceived motive, and so it must yield control of the story to the transparently self-serving ego, to that ostensible self with its own small agenda in art as well as in life. * * * Like

The dissolving, uniting forces combine what to us have been incompatible: attraction with repulsion, darkness with light, the erotic with the destructive.  If we can allow these opposites to meet they move our inner resonance to a higher vibratory plane, expanding consciousness into new realms.  It was exciting, through my explorations some of which I share in later chapters, to learn firsthand that the sacred marriage or coniunctio, the impulse to unite seeming opposites, does indeed seem to lie at the heart of the subtle body’s imaginal world. One important characteristic of the coniunctio is its paradoxical dual action.  The creative process of each sacred marriage, or conjoining of opposites, involves not only the unitive moment of joining together in a new creation or ‘third,’ but also, as I have mentioned, a separating or darkening moment.5 The idea that “darkness comes before dawn” captures this essential aspect of creativity.  To state an obvious truth we as a culture are just beginning to appreciate.  In alchemical language, when darkness falls, it is said to be the beginning of the inner work or the opus of transformation. The old king (ego) must die before the new reign dawns. The early alchemists called the dark, destructive side of these psychic unions the blackness or the nigredo.  Chaos, uncertainty, disillusionment, depression, despair, or madness prevails during these liminal times of  “making death.” The experiences surrounding these inner experiences of darkness and dying (the most difficult aspects were called mortificatio) may constitute our culture’s ruling taboo. This taboo interferes with our moving naturally to Stage Two in the individuating process, a process that requires that we pass through a descent into the underworld of the Dark Feminine realities of birthing an erotic intensity that leads to dying. Entranced by our happily-ever-after prejudiced culture, we often do not see that in any relationship, project or creative endeavor or idea some form of death follows naturally after periods of intense involvement.  When dark experiences befall, we tend to turn away, to move as quickly as possible to something positive or at least distracting, away from the negative affects of grieving, rage, terror, rotting and loss we associate with darkness and dying. As

That was the night he got up and went to the boys' division; perhaps he was looking for his history in the big room where all the boys slept, but what he found instead was Dr. Larch kissing every boy a late good night. Homer imagined then that Dr. Larch had kissed him like that, when he'd been small; Homer could not have imagined how those kisses, even now, were still kisses meant for him. They were kisses seeking Homer Wells. That was the same night that he saw the lynx on the barren, unplanted hillside—glazed with snow that had thawed and then refrozen into a thick crust. Homer had stepped outside for just a minute; after witnessing the kisses, he desired the bracing air. It was a Canada lynx—a dark, gunmetal gray against the lighter gray of the moonlit snow, its wildcat stench so strong Homer gagged to srnell the thing. Its wildcat sense was keen enough to keep it treading within a single leap's distance of the safety of the woods. The lynx was crossing the brow of the hill when it began to slide; its claws couldn't grip the crust of the snow, and the hill had suddenly grown steeper. The cat moved from the dull moonlight into the sharper light from Nurse Angela's office window; it could not help its sideways descent. It traveled closer to the orphanage than it would ever have chosen to come, its ferocious death smell clashing with the freezing cold. The lynx's helplessness on the ice had rendered its expression both terrified; and resigned; both madness and fatalism were caught in the cat's fierce, yellow eyes and in its involuntary, spitting cough as it slid on, actually bumping against the hospital before its claws could find a purchase on the crusted snow. It spit its rage at Homer Wells, as if Homer had caused its unwilling descent. Its breath had frozen on its chin whiskers and its tufted ears were beaded with ice. The panicked animal tried to dash up the hill; it was less than halfway up when it began to slide down again, drawn toward the orphanage against its will. When it set out from the bottom of the hill a second time, the lynx was panting; it ran diagonally uphill, slipping but catching itself, and slipping again, finally escaping into the softer snow in the woods— nowhere near where it had meant to go; yet the lynx would accept any route of escape from the dark hospital. Homer Wells, staring into the woods after the departed lynx, did not imagine that he would ever leave St. Cloud's more easily.

We are souls in the flesh specters caught between the limbo of yesterday and tomorrow illusions of the present imposters in these skins I am rain blown sideways by the wind My art, my love, my hunger slows the descent I spread out like a shadow on the pavement stomped on by what is, saved by what is not but is and is not are so fickle Reality and dreams dress up as one another playing musical chairs in the mind and if you are so lucky that a dream seizes the throne and turns your mind into an imagination, do not revolt, do not resist Become your madness Become the fool

This must be the 26th February 23rd I have lived through: over a quarter of a century of Februaries, and would I could cut a slice of recollection back through them all & trace the spiraling stair of my ascent adultward - or is it a descent? I feel I have lived enough to last my life in musings, tracings of crossings & re-crossings with people, mad and sane, stupid and brilliant, beautiful and grotesque, infant and antique, cold and hot, pragmatic and dream-ridden, dead and alive. My house of days and masks is rich enough so that I might and must spend years fishing, hauling up the pearl-eyed, horny, scaled and sea-bearded monsters sunk long, long in the sargasso of my imagination

He grabbed me by the shoulders, shaking me with the strength of his terrible grip. 'Suffering is temporary!' And so are you! I almost lost you. You would have died, leaving me alone. When I saw you on your sickbed, inching ever further out of reach, I swore I would never let that happen. You are mine. You belong to me. Do you think I enjoyed what i had to do? i hated it. But I had to do it. All my work, all my sacrifce, has been for a single purpose. I am going to defy death. I am going to steal the spark of creation from it, to make life eternal, untouchable by corruption. And I am doing it for you. When I succeed - and I will succeed - then you will count yourself the most blessed creature on God's earth, because you will no longer be subject to Him. I will step into that place. I will be you god, Elizabeth. I will re-create you in my image, and we will have our Eden. And it will never be taken from me.' 'You are mad.' My voice trembled, but I could contain my fury.

You need to add a quiet room down here," Bastien drawled. Yes, they did. "Why?" Chris asked. "For interrogation purposes?" "Okay," Bastien replied, voice bland. A moment passed. Then..."Oh hell no," Reordon blurted. "I am not spending tens of thousands of dollars to soundproof a room down here so you two can have sex without the vampires hearing you." "You want the vampires to hear us?" Cliff and the other vampires laughed. "No," Chris sputtered. "I mean, I don't want you having sex! Not while you're both on the clock. Melanie is supposed to be working-" "She is." Bastien defended her, an edge entering his voice. "Long hours." "And you are supposed to be serving as guard. Seven vampires live across the hallway. What are you going to do if a couple of them have psychotic breaks and try to escape while you two are having a quickie?" "Chase them down bare-ass naked and give the human guards an eyeful." That was one hell of an incentive not to escape. "I don't know about you," one fo the new vamps said in his apartment down the hallway, "but I'm pretty sure even total mind-fuck madness wouldn't make me risk that guy chasing me down and tackling me while he's naked and has a hard-on.

how he would get to Tronjheim’s base—where the Urgals were breaking in. There was no time to climb down. He looked at the narrow trough to the right of the stairs, then grabbed one of the leather pads and threw himself down on it. The stone slide was smooth as lacquered wood. With the leather underneath him, he accelerated almost instantly to a frightening speed, the walls blurring and the curve of the slide pressing him high against the wall. Eragon lay completely flat so he would go faster. The air rushed past his helm, making it vibrate like a weather vane in a gale. The trough was too confined for him, and he was perilously close to flying out, but as long as he kept his arms and legs still, he was safe. It was a swift descent, but it still took him nearly ten minutes to reach the bottom. The slide leveled out at the end and sent him skidding halfway across the huge carnelian floor. When he finally came to a stop, he was too dizzy to walk. His first attempt to stand made him nauseated, so he curled up, head in his hands, and waited for things to stop spinning. When he felt better, he stood and warily looked around. The great chamber was completely deserted, the silence unsettling. Rosy light filtered down from Isidar Mithrim. He faltered—Where was he supposed to go?—and cast out his mind for the Twins. Nothing. He froze as loud knocking echoed through Tronjheim. An explosion split the air. A long slab of the chamber floor buckled and blew thirty feet up. Needles of rocks flew outward as it crashed down. Eragon stumbled back, stunned, groping for Zar’roc. The twisted shapes of Urgals clambered out of the hole in the floor. Eragon hesitated. Should he flee? Or should he stay and try to close the tunnel? Even if he managed to seal it before the Urgals attacked him, what if Tronjheim was already breached elsewhere? He could not find all the places in time to prevent the city-mountain from being captured. But if I run to one of Tronjheim’s gates and blast it open, the Varden could retake Tronjheim without having to siege it. Before he could decide, a tall man garbed entirely in black armor emerged from the tunnel and looked directly at him. It was Durza. The Shade carried his pale blade marked with the scratch from Ajihad. A black roundshield with a crimson ensign rested on his arm. His dark helmet was richly decorated, like a general’s, and a long snakeskin cloak billowed around him. Madness burned in his maroon eyes, the madness of one who enjoys power and finds himself in the position to use it.

Truly, the road to everlasting grief is a swift descent.

Human organizations are flawed because humans are flawed. Even with the best intentions, men make errors in judgment and initiate courses of action that are counterproductive to their self-interest or the completion of the mission.

But the voice she heard in that forest wasn’t her subconscious. It couldn’t be. Or could it? Because if it was truly in her head, Verenmore posed bigger problems than mysterious woods and mysterious men. It meant her descent into madness had begun.

People did what he said, not just because it was an order but because they wanted to please him.

There was something about the way he operated that made even privates feel important.

troop-to-task roster

I’m not fucking around. Do not come in my perimeter. I own this shit. I’m the sheriff here.

You can’t show them any kindness, because kindness is weakness.

Soldiers are not stupid,” said Lauzier. “They know when the chain of command does not know what it is doing.

But one of the most valuable functions a platoon leader serves is to explain to a bunch of complaining soldiers why a mission is not stupid, a time waste, or a death trap. He helps the soldiers understand the often nonobvious logic of unpopular missions.

And if you don’t multitask everyone, then you’re never going to get it done.

organized, leader-mandated, group-on-group killing

Olivier throbbed in his veins. Not feeding put Reiner at risk. His own hunger mixed with Olivier’s madness meant Reiner’s throat would be too alluring for the wrong reasons. A descent into the wilderness would help dispel some of it; the blood would drown the rest.

You’re trying to change the subject, aren’t you?” “Definitely. In hindsight, that assistant comment probably wasn’t so slick. I should warn you—I may have these momentary Cro-Magnon lapses from time to time. Bygones.” Jordan opened her mouth to say something, then shut it. She threw her hands into the air. “How do you always do that? You tiptoe right to the edge of thoroughly pissing me off, then somehow you sweet-talk your way out of it.” Nick grinned. “Aha. I told you when we met that you’d know if I was sweet-talking you.” Jordan stared out the front windshield, shaking her head. “Seriously, I must’ve killed somebody’s prized goat or something in a former life. And this is my penance.” He laughed. “Oh, admit it. You love it.” “That’s the penance part. My slow descent into madness.” Seeing the grin curling at the edges of her lips, Nick leaned forward in his seat to kiss her. “Aw, you say the sweetest things.” And he wouldn’t have it any other way.

The whirlwind in his brain—which had so many times tugged his pituitary in ways that made him TAKE instead of GIVE— subsided for the very first time. Tightness in his crotch usually corresponded with a tightness in his gut, making him want to CONTROL, to CHOKE, to SUBDUE... but not this time. Not ever again.

Last night when he spit in my mouth, I wanted to tear him apart. Out of all the idiots I’ve slept with, none have ever treated me like a slut even though I sorta was. I’m not ashamed of my life choices. For the last decade, I was expecting my life to end on my 18th birthday. Maybe not literally, but figuratively. A slow descent into madness.

ensure the timely and accurate execution of the commander’s orders, the care and welfare of the men, the specific tasking of personnel, and advising the commander of the enlisted man’s view of things.

True leadership, the book says, inspires people to follow you because you serve their psychological need for purpose, value, and direction.

The leader has a responsibility to hold people accountable. However, there are several ways to point out deficiencies while allowing people to keep their dignity.

Of course, no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.

They had stripped us of everything we were taught made us women and then told us we were mad.

.” “If I told you everything, with no limitations, you would never sleep again. Some humans have seen things they shouldn’t, learned things they wished they hadn’t. The descent into madness isn’t linear.

In the delirious search for her redemption, I lost my way and found myself in an unknown land of descent of madness.

For this scribe has read a great many of these accounts and taken away another lesson: that to be a woman is to have your story misremembered. Discarded. Twisted. In courtyard tales, women are the adulterous wives whose treachery begins a husband's descent into murderous madness or the long-suffering mothers who give birth to proper heroes. Biographers polish away the jagged edges of capable, ruthless queens so they may be remembered as saints, and geographers warn believing men away from such and such a place with scandalous tales of lewd local females who cavort in the sea and ravish foreign interlopers. Women are the forgotten spouses and unnamed daughters. Wet nurses and handmaidens; thieves and harlots. Witches. A titillating anecdote to tell your friends back home or a warning.

For thus saith the Lord God of Israel unto me; Take the wine cup of this fury at my hand, and cause all the nations, to whom I send thee, to drink it. And they shall drink, and be moved, and be mad, because of the sword that I will send among them. Jeremiah 25:15-16

I am sorry, Shea, I was thinking only of your protection. It is difficult for me to know we are hunted while I am so helpless to protect you, that we cannot leave this place because of my weakness. You are tied to my side, and I endanger you. He tried as hard as he could to undo the damage his thoughtlessness had caused. She deserved so much more than a half-mad lifemate. She seemed to have no real idea of what they needed to survive. You have no conception of the monsters we are dealing with. It is always important to scan as you wake, before you leave a dwelling. He tried to be gentle as he imparted the information. It was easy for him to read her mounting fears. “I don’t know what you mean.” Her genuine puzzlement brought out a protective urge in him so strong that it shook his narrow world. He wanted to take her into his arms and shelter her for all eternity within his soul. She looked impossibly small and fragile, the questions in her mind as easy to read as the worry on her transparent face. His dark eyes widened in sudden understanding. You do not know the ways of our people at all, do you? “What people? I’m an American, of Irish descent. I came here to do research on a rare blood disorder, which I seem to share with you. That’s all.” Unknowingly she was biting her lip, her knuckles white from clenching her fists, her body tense, waiting for his reply. He cursed his inability to remember basic things, certain they were of great importance to the two of them. If she was as much in the dark as he was, they were in deep trouble.

As we begin this process of opening up to our inner world, we may be frightened by what we discover. For the longer we have spent denying what is going on within the less comfortable we will be with the strange thoughts and disturbing emotions that may rise to the fore. We may even wonder if the state of our psyche is in such disarray that a descent into madness is possible. The psychologist Carl Jung noticed that many of his patients had this very concern, but he believed this concern could be tempered when we recognize that this is but a natural phase in the process of inner growth.

To express love openly is to leave yourself open to injury, which he could not take, not even slightly

My slow descent into madness.

He had grown up in a home without love, filled with petty cruelties and alcoholism and despair, a place where dreams of a better life were absurd and worthy of venomous critique from his own father.

Before leaving the city I purchased $75 worth of cocaine. Had the whole police force been at my back I would not have left the city until I had my cocaine.

Cocaine has only been used about twenty years and has made more wrecks and caused more havoc than all the other drugs combined, as it is the only drug that will soften the bones and eat the flesh. It is worse than leprosy and many thought I had leprosy, as the bones were coming out and I lost my teeth and part of my jaw bone while using it.

found her lying on the bed, turned over on her face, frothing at the mouth and in spasms. I sent for Doctor Rittenhouse. He came and said, ‘she has taken some deadly poison.’ He administered all the aid in his power, but thinking the case hopeless, made out a death certificate, so that I would not have any trouble, and she lay in this condition one week before she recognized me.

While patent medicines are largely responsible for the increase of these pernicious habits, reputable physicians are not by any means free from blame. Most of them are altogether too ready to prescribe them for the relief of pain, even when it is but a slight twinge, and the habit of flying to this temporary relief soon be comes confirmed and cannot be shaken off. It was indeed recently asserted in an eastern paper that a large number of physicians are victims themselves to the cocaine and morphine habit. A large percentage of the patients treated at The St. Luke Society are physicians in good standing.

Cocaine gives an exhilarating feeling, brightens up the intellect for the time being, and makes one very fluent in conversation. I am informed that a great many of our speakers use cocaine before they step on the platform, and many of our best writers do their best work while under the influence of the drug. It is commonly reported that Edgar Allan Poe was an opium eater, and Dante’s Inferno was written while under its influence.

Eight Years in Cocaine Hell was published in 1902 and is viewed by historians as the first memoir of addiction to be written by a woman.

I always had a tender heart for the afflicted and especially those suffering in like manner, or the drug victims, of which there are over sixty thousand in Chicago—opium, morphine, laudanum, cocaine, chloral, hasheesh, etc. They are not alone in the slums, but you will find them in the palatial homes of our fair city, and the only institution that is holding out a helping hand is The St. Luke Society, where hundreds have been cured and both the slum and palace homes made happy.

These and other incidents only go to show that drug fiends have a sort of superhuman smartness in evading the detection of crime.

I never used any other drug but the clear cocaine and I believe that I am the only living person in the world to-day who ever took two hundred grains in twenty-four hours and survived.” Annie C. Meyers The autobiographical Eight Years in Cocaine Hell (1902) recounts in shockingly straightforward style the transformation of Annie C. Meyers, affluent and well-connected Chicago widow, to junkie, thief, forger, inventor of the ‘Cocaine Dance’, and ultimately authoress of the first drug confessional written by a woman.

In 1894, while attending to some legal matters, my lawyer, who noticed that I was suffering from a severe cold, advised me to try Birney’s Catarrh Remedy. He gave me a bottle and that started me on my downward course. From a well-balanced Christian woman, I became a haggard and wretched physical and mental wreck.

The victims of these drug and liquor habits need care and sympathy and should be gathered into such places as The St. Luke Society, of which I shall speak more further on, instead of sending them to the Bridewell, or jails where they are hardened and every good impulse is soon forgotten.

Her book established a literary genre, and her case helped to outlaw cocaine.” Stuart Walton, Intoxicology

If Nietzsche’s madness was psychogenic in origin, the most obvious line of investigation to follow is the possibility that he lost himself in his explorations of the unconscious. But before we follow this thread of thought, we must answer the question: if Nietzsche was aware that his explorations in the depths could end in madness, why did he take the descent?

you want to serve your country, those branches might be for you. But so might the Post Office. If you want to fight for your country, the only job to have is in combat arms, and the only job in combat arms,

Soldiers today, however, suffer mightily under the burden of “the Greatest Generation” mythos and the sanitized Hollywood depictions of World War II. There is a persistent and unfortunate sentiment among modern warriors that they will never live up to the nobility and bravery of those who saw off fascism.

Evolution Narrative The fact that the mad are 'maladjusted' to society does not mean they are maladjusted to nature, to the underlying basis of the cosmos. As Laing presciently wrote, 'Our society may itself have become biologically dysfunctional, and some forms of schizophrenic alienation from the alienation of our society may have sociobiological function that we have not recognized.' This stunning insight of Laing's has not been fully appreciated by psychiatric survivors. This idea is the basis of the vision of the eminent Indian Philosopher and yogi Sri Aurobindo. Though we are presently mired by ignorance, human beings sooner or later must ascend to a more enlightened state, we must realize the divine life, the eternal life, on Earth. This will involve a profound change of society, humanity, and of the cosmos itself: society will be based on a realization of the unity of humanity, not on, as at present, the division of humanity and the struggle for survival of the fittest (in reality, the most ruthless). The current 'laws of nature' will be transcended by 'newer ones' more conducive to human happiness. As Sri Aurobindo wrote, 'The ascent of man into heaven is not the key, but rather his ascent here into the spirit and the descent also of the spirit into his normal humanity and the transformation of this earthly nature.' This, and not 'some post-mortem salvation,' Aurobindo tells us, is the 'new birth' for which humanity waits as the 'crowning movement' of its 'long, obscure and painful history.' The dream of heaven on Earth – the recovery of paradise that has haunted the collective imagination for millennia – will be realized. The human being must transform herself so that she can be the instrument of this planetary transformation. 'Man is at highest a half-god who has risen out of the animal nature, and is splendidly abnormal in it, but the thing which man has started off to be, the whole God,' wrote Aurobindo, 'is something so much greater than what he is, that it seems to him as abnormal to himself as he is to the animal. This means a great and arduous labor of growth before him, but also a splendid crown of his race and his victory. This new being would indeed be abnormal by the standards of society, of the mental health system. The process by which she would evolve spiritually might take unexpected turns, it might – and clearly often does – lead through madness. It might indeed be madness by our currents standards.

It made her mad. Maybe she was a bit too proud. And profane at times. With a temper, yes. And indiscreet, certainly. She'd made a few mistakes. Who hadn't?